It’s not surprising that you can make a static compiler that makes tiny little programs written in a dynamic language into fast executables.
The hard part is making that scale to >=10,000 LoC programs. I dunno which static reasoning approaches codon uses, but all the ones I’m familiar with fall apart when you try to scale to large code.
That’s why JS benchmarking focused on larger and larger programs over time. Even the small programs that JS JIT writers use tend to have a lot of subtle idioms that break static reasoning, to model what happens in larger programs.
If you want to get in the business of making dynamic languages fast then the best advice I can give you is don’t use any of the benchmarks that these folks cite for your perf tuning. If you really do have to start with small programs then something like Richards or deltablue are ok, but you’ll want to diversify to larger programs if you really want to keep it real.
(Source: I was a combatant in the JS perf wars for a decade as a webkitten.)
[1]: https://exaloop.io/benchmarks/